By Will York

SATANIC BLOOD- lust rituals! Offshore tax-evasion schemes! Offensive personal hygiene!

Ah, just kidding – and making a pathetic plea for your attention in lieu of writing a legitimate story lead. I don't mean to shortchange them, but the Curtains are not an easy band to work up a scintillating story angle on. They don't represent any hot new trends in music – sure, they're "angular" at times, but not in a Rough Trade or No New York sense – and as far as I can tell, they're all pretty level-headed guys. They write a lot of songs, make good, honest, nonderivative music, and know how to get it across on record.

The Curtains get filed in the "avant rock" category and earn props from magazines like the Wire, but their music is more likely to conjure images of cuddly sweaters, eight-bit video games, music boxes, and happy little robots than stern music professors or scientists in lab coats.

Shagg it to me

Reviews of their records are big on words such as innocent, childlike, and whimsical. Their press release uses the term "coming-of-age music," and some writers have gone so far as to compare the band to the Shaggs, those standard-bearers for musical naïveté who twisted their domineering dad's would-be hit pop songs into unexplainable freaks of nature.

Curtains leader-guitarist Chris Cohen explains over the phone, "The Shaggs invented their own music completely alone, which is very hard to do but gives you the greatest results, the most original.

"The idea that someone could just start right at the beginning and go all the way to having your own scales and rhythms is, in fact, what we're working on in the Curtains, and if everybody did that, we would be living in heaven."

The Shaggs comparison is a stretch, though, for a couple of reasons. First, it implies the Curtains don't know what they're doing and have arrived at their sound by accident, when that's not the case. Second, and more fundamentally, they know who the Shaggs are and are familiar with their music – which means they can't be as genuinely naive and out of the loop as the Shaggs, who, after all, just wanted to sound like Herman's Hermits.

Hybrid and lonesome

Sonically, a better comparison for the Curtains is that ubiquitous underground-rock influence Captain Beefheart – specifically, the quieter side shown in his band's often-overlooked guitar-based instrumentals. In another article ("Trout Mask Replicas?," 9/3/03), I recently complained about the frustrating tendency of bands to reduce the Beefheart influence to a disorganized racket topped by some jackass, bellowing nonsense lyrics, so this allusion is meant as a compliment.

Asked about the Captain's influence, though, drummer Andrew Maxwell simply writes in an e-mail, "Captain Beefheart was a Californian. Like many Californians, he was self-invented, a hybrid. He imported half of everything he did but absorbed his influences without servitude or parody. He was also fundamentally lonely. All these things hold true for the Curtains."

Cohen says, "[Beefheart's music] was more about adult things, and he listened to rhythm and blues and was like the leader of a gang who would do whatever he said. The Curtains is not like that, unfortunately."

Then again, the Curtains aren't without their adult qualities or signs of maturity, either.

In the course of our e-mail interview, Maxwell casually drops bonus-round vocabulary words such as picaresque, gadabouts, and discomfiting into his responses. On record, his drums tiptoe around Cohen's airy guitar melodies and Greg Saunier's playful synth with an obviously jazz-schooled finesse. He also sings now and then, in a starched-collar style that's comparable to that of Gastr del Sol's David Grubbs, post-rock's ultimate too-smart-for-his-own-good grad-student type.

Playing hard and soft

The singing is kind of hard to take, although more for the self-aware cleverness it radiates than for its actual sound. The rest of the Curtains' music works like it does, though, because of how well they balance these sorts of dangerous art-school tendencies with their oft-noted soft 'n' playful side – not to mention a measured use of dissonance and an ability to rock hard when they want to (which, admittedly, isn't all that often).

The cartoon cover of their new album, Flybys (Thin Wrist), does a great job of representing the band's music in visual terms. It depicts an assembly line that's designed to spray icing on cakes as they pass, only the machine is out of sync and spraying globs of baby blue, light green, yellow, and pink icing all over the conveyor belt instead. This drawing, with its pastel images of malfunctioning machinery and kids' desserts, is an excellent analogy for the stumbling rhythms, gear-grinding synths, and friendly melodies of the band's fractured, yet charming, instrumental etudes, which their in-house songwriting factory churns out at an estimated rate of 50 a year.

The Curtains' delicate balance of the sweet and the sour is comparable to that of local peers Deerhoof, but that's no surprise considering the many links between the two bands: Cohen and Saunier, who replaced Curtains guitarist Trevor Shimizu when the latter moved to New York last year, are also in Deerhoof. Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich recorded the Curtains' first album, the vinyl-only Fast Talks (also on Thin Wrist), and Deerhoof bassist-vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki has played in a live version of the Curtains. And while Cohen still writes most of the Curtains' music, and Saunier and Matsuzaki handle most of Deerhoof's, the collaborative nature of both bands helps blur the lines a bit. As Cohen puts it, "Two songs have been successfully played in both bands, so you can't really tell what to do."

In any case, the tension involved in the Curtains' aesthetic balancing act supplies the drama at their live shows, which, in other words, are pretty sedate. Unlike a lot of their kin in the noisier portion of the Bay Area experimental-rock underground, they don't draw on props or over-the-top stage antics to entertain folks or hammer their point home. In fact, they don't hammer their point home at all. "We prefer a musical conversation to a shouting match," Maxwell explains. "Why bring the aesthetic of extreme TV into the free space of music?"

Actually, the thought of somebody coming up with a musical reenactment of something like that recent Man vs. Beast Fox TV special, which included an eat-off between a man and a grizzly bear, is kind of appealing. But Maxwell's point is well taken, and while some of us have been spoiled by the recent wave of bands going all-out to entertain us with their crowd-surfing, equipment-wrecking live antics, the plus side here is that the Curtains' recordings can, and do, accurately represent the band. Unlike a group such as Colorado cult-favorite and van-rockers Friends Forever – whose live shows are lots of fun but whose records are boring – they don't require a DVD to get their point across to the shut-ins of the world.

"When we play live, we hope that it's actually fun for people to try and catch all the notes," Cohen says. "We do not cleanse people or baptize them with fire. I have undergone catharsis before – one time I fell into a trash can, but it was not a musical highlight in my life. But maybe cathartic is just a misleading word because it's like trying to purge things from your body, which doesn't appeal to me to try to do."

Meanwhile you'll have to count Cohen out of the Bay Area music scene, for now. "As far as this San Francisco thing you're talking about, I have to say I am excluded: I live in Los Angeles now, where there's a good garage for me to play in and a swimming pool," he says (Maxwell also lives in L.A.). "That's actually what our next album will be about."